Chapter I: Front Matter

Poems

of

West and East

By V. Sackville-West

(The Hon. Mrs. Harold Nicolson)

London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, Vigo St., W.

New York: John Lane Company, MCMXVII

Printed at The Complete Press, West Norwood

To the unkindest of critics H.G.N.

CONTENTS

FOR ***
SONG: LET US GO BACK
SONG: MY SPIRIT LIKE A SHEPHERD BOY
CONVALESCENCE
TO KNOLE
DISILLUSION
THE BANQUET
MCMXVIII
A CREED
TO A POET
NOMADS
THE GARDEN
THE DANCING ELF
CONSTANTINOPLE:
DHJI-HAN-GHIR
LEBLEBIDJI
THE MUEZZIN
THE GREEK HAN
YANGHIN VAR
MORNING IN CONSTANTINOPLE
RETOUR EN SONGE
CONSTANTINOPLE, MARCH MCMXV
RESOLUTION

POEMS

FOR ***

NO eyes shall see the poems that I write
For you; not even yours; but after long
Forgetful years have passed on our delight
Some hand may chance upon a dusty song

Of those fond days when every spoken word
Was sweet, and all the fleeting things unspoken
Yet sweeter, and the music half unheard
Murmured through forests as a charm unbroken.

It is the plain and ordinary page
Of two who loved, sole-spirited and clear.
Will you, O stranger of another age,
Not grant a human and compassionate tear
To us, who each the other held so dear?
A single tear fraternal, sadly shed,
Since that which was so living, is so dead.

SONG: LET US GO BACK

LET us go back together to the hills.
Weary am I of palaces and courts,
Weary of words disloyal to my thoughts,--
Come, my beloved, let us to the hills.

Let us go back together to the land,
And wander hand in hand upon the heights;
Kings have we seen, and manifold delights,--
Oh, my beloved, let us to the land!

Lone and unshackled, let us to the road
Which holds enchantment round each hidden bend,
Our course uncompassed and our whim its end,
Our feet once more, beloved, to the road!

SONG: MY SPIRIT LIKE A SHEPHERD BOY "Convalescente di squisiti mali"

MY spirit like a shepherd boy
Goes dancing down the lane.
When all the world is young with joy
Must I lie here in pain?

With shepherd's pipe my spirit fled
And cloven foot of Pan;
The mortal bondage he has shed
And shackling yoke of man.

And though he leave me cold and mute,
A traitor to his care,
I smile to hear his honeyed flute
Hang on the scented air.

CONVALESCENCE

WHEN I am in the Orient once again,
And turn into the gay and squalid street,
One side in the shadow, one in vivid heat,
The thought of England, fresh beneath the rain,
Will rise unbidden as a gently pain.
The lonely hours of illness, as they beat
Crawling through days with slow laborious feet,
And I lay gazing through the leaded pane,
Idle, and listened to the swallows' cry
After the flitting insect swiftly caught,
--Those all-too-leisured hours as they went by,
Stamped as their heritage upon my thought
The memory of a square of summer sky
Jagged by the gables of a Gothic court.

TO KNOLE October 1, 1913

I
I LEFT thee in the crowds and in the light,
And if I laughed or sorrowed none could tell.
They could not know our true and deep farewell
Was spoken in the long preceding night.

Thy mighty shadow in the garden's dip!
To others dormant, but to me awake;
I saw a window in the moonlight shake,
And traced the angle of the gable's lip,

And knew thy soul, benign and grave and mild,
Towards me, morsel of morality,
And grieving at the parting soon to be,
A patriarch about to lose a child.

For many come and soon their tale is told,
And thou remainest, dimly feeling pain,
Aware the time draws near to don again
The sober mourning of the very old.

II
Pictures and galleries and empty rooms!
Small wonder that my games were played alone;
Half of the rambling house to call my own,
And wooded gardens with mysterious glooms.

My fingers ran among the tassels faded;
My playmates moved in arrases brocaded;
I slept beside the canopied and shaded
Beds of forgotten kings.
I wandered shoeless in the galleries;
I contemplated long the tapestries,
And loved the ladies for their histories
And hands with many rings.

Beneath an oriel window facing south
Through which the unniggard sun poured morning
streams,
I daily stood and laughing drank the beams,
And, catching fistfuls, pressed them in my mouth.

This I remember, and the carven oak,
The long and polished floors, the many stairs,
Th' heraldic windows, and the velvet chairs,
And portraits that I knew so well, they almost spoke.

III
So I have loved thee, as a lonely child
Might love the kind and venerable sire
With whom he lived, and whom at youthful fire
Had ever sagely, tolerantly smiled;

In whose old weathered brain a boundless store
Lay hid of riches never to be spent;
Who often to the coaxing child unbent
In hours' enchantment of delightful lore.

So in the night we parted, friend of years,
I rose a stranger to thee on the morrow;
Thy stateliness knows neither joy nor sorrow,--
I will not wound such dignity by tears.

DISILLUSION